THIS PAST JANUARY, I drove from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to the country’s northern highlands with my mother and my cousin, a seasoned tour guide. I came to research locations where certain battles took place during the 1935-41 Italo-Ethiopian war and occupation for the novel I was writing. The book follows fighters on both sides of the bloody conflict that would eventually see Mussolini’s invaders ousted. My Ethiopian soldiers—part of an army comprised of both men and women—waged war near the scenic, rugged landscape of the Simien Mountains so that’s where we were headed. I was looking for historically accurate, mappable geography that could exist alongside the fictive terrain where my characters woke, slept, fought and loved.

Our route would take us past ancient churches, and I campaigned to stop briefly in the town of Lalibela, home to some of the most spectacular examples. As we drove away from Addis, rolling hills gave way to rocky peaks, and massive, flat-topped boulders plummeted to lush valleys dissected by tributaries or ambling rivers. I watched trees and flowers zoom past my window in bursts of color, awed by the beauty of it all. That splendor seemed a fitting segue for my first visit to Lalibela’s 11 rock-hewn churches, which date to the 12th and 13th centuries. These monolithic structures are so precise in measurements and angles, so beautifully designed, that legend says their construction was aided by angels.

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One of the most famous, Bete Giorgis, has a cross-shape roof that is level with the ground. Laborers had to dig down some 50 feet while artfully carving stone. The church is a giant rock hollowed out to contain arched, frescoed ceilings, sturdy columns and worship spaces. I stood at the base of the church—watching priests walk through its square, wooden doors, worshipers lean comfortably against its stone facade and nuns sit while quietly reading their Bibles—and marveled at the artistry of those long-gone builders.

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‘At the site of a former Italian military camp, I set my imagined world in place. The past felt horrifyingly alive.’
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Looking up, I felt engulfed by both stone and sky, and it seemed that for a moment, I could sense what still remained from all those centuries past. For just a fleeting second, I glimpsed a part of life—that stubborn hopefulness—that had tucked itself outside of time’s crashing momentum.

I carried the memory of Bete Giorgis with me to the site of a former Italian military camp on the outskirts of Debark. There, I set my imagined world in place, propping up the barricades and positioning my fighters with their rifles and tanks and spears, ready to charge. As I nudged these fictional men and women to rise up and rush against each other, I was staggered by the enormity of it all. The whoosh of a bullet: There it was. The cry of the fallen: so close. The deep, earthshaking rumble of an approaching tank: over there to my left. The past felt horrifyingly alive. The reassurance I felt in Lalibela was gone. It all felt—we all felt—so fragile.

Shaken, I thought back to a conversation I had with a curator at the Morgan Library in New York City a few years back. It was a wintry day, and as we talked about the history of the Mesopotamian valley, we discussed ISIS’s 2015 destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. In a deliberate campaign to erase part of that country’s cultural heritage, temples, columns and precious works of art were blown up or mutilated. Didn’t it devastate him, as a historian of the area, I asked? We were standing in front of a vitrine of delicately engraved Sumerian seals and tablets. He pointed to them as he shook his head. Sumer, too, had been destroyed thousands of years ago. Many of the artifacts from the Fertile Crescent had succumbed to human and natural forces. They were buried and forgotten but some things, somehow, survive and resurface.

On the drive back to Addis Ababa, I kept thinking about Palmyra and the recent efforts to salvage the ancient city. I thought of Syrians who fled the destruction that also encompassed human lives. As we continued on, I waved at children in their school uniforms while a farmer poked his goats off the road to let us pass. And as my cousin pointed out a large rock formation where monks lived ensconced from the modern world, I felt a new calm, tempered but firm.

If history reminds us of the seeming inevitability of conflicts, if it reveals the most tender vulnerabilities, then it also provides evidence of all those deliberate decisions that humans make to get up every day and build sturdy testaments of hope for another generation. Not everything survives, but what does might just be strong enough to honor what could not.